The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume 6 (60 page)

It takes a lot of steps, and it seems that we cannot begin unless we are willing to begin at the beginning.

Student:
Apropos of the beginning, you said the dualistic misunderstanding comes right at the beginning. Does a glimpse or taste of the nondualistic totality also come at the beginning?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Yes. That is why a misunderstanding was possible. The misunderstanding had to be accommodated somewhere. So we can’t condemn the beginning as a mistake in the fashion of the “Fall of Man.”

Student:
In the question period following the previous talk, you seemed to be speaking of a sense of greater spaciousness in connection with prajna. You connected nonduality more with jnana. I don’t really understand this.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Prajna is like what we experience in connection with our discussions in this and the other talks. We talk about jnana and the level of absolute totality, but in so doing we are relating to it from an outsider’s point of view, we are relating to it as an experience. That way it becomes prajna, or knowledge—information. It is prajna until we completely and totally identify with the whole thing. The process of being is not learning how to be. Learning and just being are different.

S:
Your discussion of vajra suggests that it operates on the prajna level, that it is subject-and-object oriented. Is that correct?

TR:
The vajra experience of intellect is on the jnana level. It is just totally seeing through everything. That transcends prajna, which is still somewhat of an adolescent approach.

S:
On the nondualistic level, can there be such things as buddha families and prajna and the world of distinctions?

TR:
That is exactly what we have been saying is the case in this talk. The level of nondual reality is the realm of jnana, therefore there is discriminating-awareness wisdom happening all the time. On that level, there is in fact a living world, a much more living one than we are experiencing.

S:
It sounds like there would be a contradiction there, because to discriminate is to find duality.

TR:
There is no problem with finding duality. We are speaking here of the relative world in purely psychological terms. We are talking about relative fixation, relative hang-ups, rather than seeing things as two. That is not regarded as dualistic fixation but still as discriminating awareness. I mean, an enlightened person is able to go down the street and take his bus—as a matter of act, he can do it much better than we can, because he is always there.

Student:
In terms of beginning at the beginning, what is the role of meditation practice?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Meditation practice right at the beginning is acceptance of being a fool. You continually acknowledge that you are making a fool out of yourself pretending to be meditating, rather than believing you are transcending something or being holy or good. If you start from that matter-of-fact level, acknowledging your self-deceptions, then you begin to pick up on something more than being a fool. There’s something in it. You begin to learn to give. You no longer have to defend yourself constantly. So that practice involves tremendous discipline in your daily living situation. It is not just sitting practice alone, but your total life situation becomes part of your meditation practice. That provides a lot of ground for relating with things very simply, without concepts involved. And then at some stage, of course, you begin to lose any sense of effort or self-conscious awareness that you are meditating. The boundaries of your meditation begin to dissolve, and it becomes nonmeditation or all meditation.

S:
Isn’t that initial wanting also spiritual materialism?

TR:
It is, but at least it is quite genuine rather than pretended. That makes things simpler. Obviously, at the beginning you feel you want to achieve something. That is okay, and it helps you get into the practice. In the case of spiritual materialism, the deceptive aspect is that you do not even face the facts of your neurosis. Each time you practice something, you think in terms of getting some magical power, trying to become powerful instead of unmasking yourself. But without that initial wanting there would be no stepping-stone, no language. Seeing that situation is exactly what I mean by regarding yourself as a fool.

Student:
Rinpoche, could you please explain again what you mean by accommodating?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It is a sense of nondefensiveness, accommodating richness or expansiveness and the magnetic qualities without making a solid boundary. It is not an effort; it is just letting things be accommodated without any relative relationship.

Student:
How does this highly intellectual talk get us closer to nirvana and farther from samsara?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
If you approach it from that angle, it doesn’t.

S:
Of course not, but isn’t that the angle from which it is being approached?

TR:
We always have to speak in relative language, which automatically becomes intellectual.

S:
Granted the need to speak in relative language, I have still found this talk quite confusing.

TR:
That seems to be the whole point. We should realize that there is some discrepancy, that everything is not clear-cut and black and white. Feeling confused is the starting point. When you are confused, you don’t believe in your confusion as being the answer. Because you are confused, you feel that the answer must be something else more clear. That invites further questioning, which contains the answer within itself. One begins to work on oneself that way.

In other words, the teaching is not meant to provide something sound and solid and precise, in such a way that you don’t have to work for anything and the teaching feeds you constantly. The reason for presenting the teaching is to make you work further, to confuse you more. And you have to get through the confusion. The teaching is encouragement to find the stepping-stone that is closest to you—which is confusion.

Student:
Would you say that unconditioned, nondualistic energies have as resources the energies that are still conditioned?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
I wouldn’t say that. The unconditioned energies are self-perpetuating, because there are no relations involved. They exist like space itself, which does not have a central point or an edge. It remains as it is by itself, feeds itself, lives by itself. The conditioned energies are also accommodated within this unconditioned one. Somehow the unconditioned energy can express itself in terms of the conditioned ones. But it doesn’t survive or feed on them. That’s why conditioned energy is redundant from the point of view of unconditioned energy. It doesn’t need to exist. That is why it stagnates. There is no outlet for it, and it becomes a self-perpetuating dying and rotting process. The only way it can maintain itself is to get energy from itself, and it is already very stagnant.

Student:
You mentioned that the Chinese developed different visualizations for the various deities and pointed out that the tradition is always up to date. I was wondering if we American Buddhists might develop our own visualizations of the deities that might be more appropriate for us.

S:
For example, mahakalas in blue jeans.
³

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Fat chance!

In China, the process was very unself-conscious. It just evolved that way. But in the West, we are in a highly self-conscious state about culture—it has already been raped. All of art has already been raped and made into a conditioned situation. The tradition would get made into pop art or collage—having a Tibetan painting with an astronaut walking across it or something of that nature. The situation with regard to art has become quite degenerate.

The point is that if we could make the process less self-conscious, something could develop, but since we already have a self-conscious world, that would probably be very difficult. In fact, the same problem existed in Tibet. The Chinese took the whole thing very freely, but the Tibetans were very self-conscious about their culture. They regarded it as inferior to the Aryan culture of India. The Indians used to refer to Tibet as the preta-puri, the place of hungry ghosts. They regarded it as uncultured and savage. To the Tibetans became very self-conscious about it. Therefore, instead of creating Tibetan deities, they decided to take refuge in the Aryan culture from the beginning. So in Tibet there are no Tibetans in the form of Vairochana or anything like that. That is an interesting analogy.

Student:
When an offering is made in the form of a mandala, what is that and how is it done? For example, Naropa is described as offering Tilopa a mandala.

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Well, that is not a mandala in the sense of a psychological or spiritual one. It’s just a portrait of the world with the continents and oceans and everything. Making that offering represents giving up your ground so that you have nowhere to live. That is the ultimate sense of “refugee.”

Student:
Is there such a thing as a pure expression of pure energy?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
It would mean getting out of the whirlpool of the relative world. Then it would become open for the very reason that it would no longer be dependent on the relative world.

Student:
From the point of view of “not-two,” how does compassion arise?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Just not dwelling on a point of reference provides a lot of space to be. Compassion is open space in which things can be accommodated. It contrasts strongly with our repulsing situations because we are not willing to accommodate anything. So compassion is creating open space, accepting things happening.

S:
How do you create that openness?

TR:
If you have to create it, then it is no longer compassion. I suppose, to begin with, in order to develop compassion you have to be willing to be alone or lonely. You are completely and totally in a desolate situation, which is also open space at the same time. The development of compassion is not a matter of acquiring a partnership with things, but rather of letting everything be open. So the sense of loneliness or aloneness is the real starting point for compassion.

Student:
In the beginning of the seminar, you talked a lot about boundary, and now you have talked about the mandala as being boundless. Can you clarify that?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
The samsaric mandala is divided by boundaries, because there are certain emotions and psychological states; they are there because you maintain them to survive. The total mandala, the mandala of totality, is not dependent on boundaries at all. Therefore, its expressions are regarded as different aspects of one totality. The accommodating aspect of space and the penetrating [or expansive] aspect of space are simply different aspects of the same thing. You could talk about the lightgiving aspect of the sun as the basis for timing our lives—that is all talking about different aspects of the same thing. There are no boundaries there, just different expressions.

S:
Should the boundaries be considered as a real principle of reality or existence?

TR:
Boundaries happen like taking a snapshot. You take a snapshot, say, at 1/125th of a second. You take the snapshot, and it is frozen on a piece of paper.

Student:
What is the relationship between what you talked about earlier, experiencing the charnel ground through a sense of insecurity, and seeing the totality, which seems to be the key to the buddha mandala?

Trungpa Rinpoche:
Totality shares the attributes of insecurity. When the samsaric mind views totality, it sees insecurity, a threat, a place to die. Totality is extremely threatening because there is nothing to hold on to. It is completely vast space. Whereas from its own point of view, totality does not contain any kind of reference point. Therefore, the question of threat or insecurity does not arise at all.

We have to stop at this point. It would be good to work further on the things we discussed, reflect on them and relate them with your experience. What we have talked about is the meaning of space, which is something that, in our everyday life, we all automatically face. In the city or on the farm, in our family situation or at our job, we are constantly involved with space. So the relationship with the mandala goes on—at least the irritating aspect. It is not something we can turn off, thinking, “Now I’ve gotten my money’s worth, I’ll just switch it off and forget it.” No matter how much we try to forget it, it continues to go on. So it is not merely a matter of having acquired some information; there is some element of commitment, because the totality of your life is involved. We have to relate with our life situations and find out more.

Part Two

MANDALA OF THE FIVE BUDDHA FAMILIES

Karmê Chöling, 1974

ONE

The Basic Ground

I
N ORDER TO UNDERSTAND
the mandala of the five buddha families, I think it is necessary for us to realize the implications of the mandala principle in terms of our psychological state and our awareness in our everyday lives.

First of all, there are some points concerning the ground that is in some sense serving our being. That is the ground of the five buddha families. The five buddha-family principles are not five separate entities. Rather, what we have is one principle manifested in five different aspects. We could speak of five different manifestations of one basic energy: a manifestation of its richness, of its fertility, of its intelligence, and so forth.

We are talking about one basic intelligence, so to speak, or one energy. A wide area of confusion and wisdom exists in the background of all the five principles, whether we look at them in their buddha, or enlightened, form or in their confused form. There is a basic pattern that is common to all that. It is the potentiality for enlightenment and the actual experience of confusion, pain, and so forth.